Experts Rate Online Calorie Counters

The usual weapons in the diet wars are a gym membership, sneakers and an often wavering will. Try adding a computer.

Documenting your diet is known to aid weight loss. Studies have shown that food diaries help people lose twice as much weight as they would have had they not kept track of what they ate.

And online calorie trackers, many of which are free to use immediately or following free registration on the website, can be powerful additions to the weight loss arsenal.

"How people choose to keep track will vary depending on lifestyle and personality," said Connie Diekman, director of University Nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis. "Having websites as an option is very helpful."

The benefits of sites that track your food, compared to a simple, pen-and-paper food diary, are that they categorize and display what you are eating every day. By offering caloric and nutritional information about specific foods, an online calorie counter aids the weight loss battle by pinpointing areas of nutritional improvement.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the average American adult should eat 2,000 to 2,600 calories each day to maintain their weight. Most people must slash their daily intake to 1,500 calories if they want to lose weight.

But diet experts caution that online calorie counters are tools that can only help approximate how healthy your diet is and reiterate that exercise and an overall healthy lifestyle are essential to weight management. All calorie counters are not created equal, and it may take some trial and error -- and a lot of food-related data entry -- to find a site that is a good match.

"To use them wisely, you need to be honest. That's not as easy as it sounds -- people notoriously underestimate what they eat," said Keith Ayoob, nutritionist and associate professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Decide what you need... The best bet is to get educated about eating healthfully, decide on an activity regimen, then turn off the computer, get up from your desk, and go do it."

The following are a few sites that could be strong weapons against weight gain.

My Pyramid Tracker is the yardstick against which experts measure other calorie counting sites because it was created using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Particularly in cases where boutique sites are not forthcoming with the source of their nutritional information, doctors recommend verifying the numbers with the values on this site to confirm the correct amount of calories in particular foods.

"This site is good for anyone who really wants to know where their diet stands, nutritionally," Ayoob said. "It can be a useful ongoing tool for the person who has lost weight but 'plateaued' and who needs a brush-up to find out how daily eating has changed."

But some are less impressed with the food selection available at My Pyramid Tracker, saying that it is not as large and varied as other sites. This can be a problem when people are not comfortable approximating or substituting what they actually ate for something that could be similar, thus cheating themselves out of a complete dietary picture.